Low Quality, High Cost – mHealth Apps Not So Popular With Americans?

According to a new survey published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the use of mHealth apps among Americans is unflatteringly low and abysmally falling thanks to the apps’ high costs and under par performance.

58% of the 1604 respondents of the survey had health apps in their smartphones mostly to track nutrition and fitness aspects of their health. 46% of that group stopped using the apps after a short time, citing dissatisfaction with the interface, sheer loss of interest, having to face hidden costs and complexity in entry of data.

The remaining 42% of the respondents did not have mHealth apps in their phones. A negligible proportion of them were unconscious of mHealth apps and their existence while the rest, who deliberately could not download these apps gave their main reasons for doing so as lack of interest in the available apps, unwillingness to meet subsequent costs and fear of personal data exposure to third parties.

Currently, there are more than 165,000 registered mHealth apps being used in the US, but almost half of all downloads are generated by only 36 apps, with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile boasting the highest numbers of users. Authors of the report have put this down to the time-consuming data entry procedures and navigation difficulties in most apps.

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